Introduction
Hello and welcome!
I am finally back to blogging after having a brief hiatus in order to take my final exams. Whilst the trauma is still fresh in my mind, I would like to share with you the top 5 social media tips that helped me through the dark days of undergraduate medicine. Some of you may have already read my old essay on 'How Medical Students should interact with Social Media Networking Sites' and this document deals with some of the problems with professionalism surrounding the use of social media. This blog will not cover such issues, but will instead focus on how you can use social media to benefit your learning/ revision processes.
Top Tip 1: YouTube
For those of you who are unaware, YouTube is a video-sharing website. Sometimes the site is overlooked as a 'social media' resource but if you consider the simple definition of Social Networking Sites as 'those with user led content,' you can quickly see how YouTube definitely falls into the social media category.
It wasn't until I got to University that I realised the potency of YouTube as an educational tool. It has a use at every stage of medical education and it is FREE. If you are still in your pre-clinical training then there are a wealth of videos that depict cellular processes and 3D anatomy - very useful content for the visual learner.
For the clinical student, there are a number of OSCE demonstration videos that may be useful in honing your examination skills. There are also a number of presentations on clinical topics that have been uploaded, however, YouTube has no quality control measures for these videos (to my knowledge) so it may be best to subscribe to a more official source if you like to use podcasts/ uploaded presentations for your revision.
Another reason YouTube comes in as my number 1 top tip is because I find it difficult to procrastinate whilst using the site. Sure, you can start looking up music and videos that have nothing to do with medicine but personally I find that having a little bit of music on in the background helps me work for longer periods, which is a definite bonus during the revision period.
On the other hand, there are many that find YouTube difficult to harness due to the draw of funny videos and favourite Vloggers (Video Bloggers) that can distract the unwary from revision for hours on end. At the end of the day, YouTube was created for funny videos (predominantly of cats it seems) and not for medical education, and this should be kept in mind if you choose to use it as a tool for your learning.
Top Tip 2: Facebook
Yes, the dreaded Facebook comes in at number two for me. Facebook is by far and away my largest source of procrastination when it comes to writing / working / revising or learning. It is a true devil in disguise, however, there are some very useful features for those who like to work in groups during their revision...
For example, during the last six months I have organised a small revision group through Facebook. We set up a 'private page' and each week I would post what topics would be covered in the weeks session. Due to the nature of Facebook, people were obviously able to reply to my posts with suggestions for future topics etc. We were also able to upload photos of useful resources that one or more of us had seen in a tutorial in which the other students hadn't been able to attend. And most importantly, we were able to upload revision notes for each other via the Facebook 'files' tab. This last feature was invaluable for sharing basic notes between a few close colleagues. However, for proper file sharing I strongly recommend the file sharing service 'Dropbox,' which provides free storage for your documents and the ability to access files from any computer or device with internet.
Coming back to Facebook, my final thoughts are: if you don't like group work or seeing what your colleagues are doing via their statuses or private messages then it probably isn't a useful resource for you. If you have the motivation (unlike myself) to freeze your Facebook account I can imagine you would end up procrastinating far less (or you'll start procrastinating on something else entirely!).
Top Tip 3: Twitter
Twitter is a microblogging site. This means that users upload microblogs or 'Tweets' containing useful information they have found on the internet or read in other people's tweets.
Twitter's utility as an educational resource is directly related to the 'type' of people you follow. For example, I use Twitter primarily to connect with other people interested in social media, art & medicine and medical education. This means my home screen on twitter is full of people posting about these topics, which I find useful. Alternatively, I could have used my Twitter account to 'follow' all the same friends I 'follow' on Facebook. This would have meant my Twitter home page would have felt like a fast-paced, less detailed version of my Facebook feed just with more hashtags and acronyms - not very useful for finding educational resources. With this in mind, consider setting up two twitter accounts to tease apart the useful tweets about the latest clinical podcast from the useless tweets about what your second cousin once removed just had for lunch.
A friend suggested to me that if you really get into twitter it is also possible to use one account and 'group' your followers so that you can see different 'types' of tweets at different times. This seems like a good way to filter the information you are reading, as long as you can figure out how to set up the filters in the first place.
Like all Social Media Sites, Twitter gets its fair share of bad press re. online professionalism and its tendency to lure users into hours of procrastination. So again, use with caution.
Top Tip 4: Meducation
It would not be right to write this blog and not include Meducation in the line-up. Meducation is the first website that I have personally come across where users (students, doctors etc) upload and share information (i.e. the very soul of what social networking is about) that is principally about medicine and nothing else. I'm sure there may be other similar sites out there, but the execution of this site is marvellous and that is what has set it apart from its competitors and lead to its rapid growth (especially over the last two years, whilst i've been aware of the site).
When I say 'execution,' I mean the user interface (which is clean and simple), the free resources (giving a taste of the quality of material) and the premium resources (which lecture on a variety of interesting clinical topics rather than sticking to the bread and butter topics 24/7).
One of my favourite features of Meducation is the ability to ask 'Questions' to other users. These questions are usually asked by people wishing to improve niche knowledge and so being able to answer a question always feels like a great achievement. Both the questions and answers are mostly always interesting, however the odd question does slip through the net where it appears the person asking the question might have skipped the 'quick google search' phase of working through a tough topic.
Meducation harnesses social networking in an environment almost free from professionalism and procrastination issues. Therefore, I cannot critique the site from this angle. Instead, I have decided to highlight the 'Exam Room' feature of the website. The 'Exam Room' lets the user take a 'mock exam' using what I can only assume is a database of questions crafted by the Meducation team themselves (+/- submissions from their user base). However, it is in my opinion that this feature is not up to scratch with the level and volume of questions provided by the competitors in this niche market. I feel wrong making this criticism whilst blogging on Meducation and therefore I will not list or link the competitors I am thinking of here, but they will be available via my unaffiliated blog (Occipital Designs). I hope the Meducation team realise that I make this observation because I feel that with a little work their question database could be improved to the point where it is even better than other sites AND there would also be all the other resources Meducation has to offer. This would make Meducation a truly phenomenal resource.
Top Tip 5: Blogging
Blogging itself is very useful. Perhaps not necessarily for the learning / revision process but for honing the reflective process. Reflective writing is a large component of undergrad medical education and is disliked by many students for a number of reasons, not least of which is because many find some difficulty in putting their thoughts and feelings on to paper and would much prefer to write with the stiffness and stasis of academic prose.
Blogging is great practice for breaking away from essay-writing mode and if you write about something you enjoy you will quickly find you are easily incorporating your own personal thoughts and feelings into your writing (as I have done throughout this blog). This is a very organic form of reflection and I believe it can greatly improve your writing when you come to write those inevitable reflective reports.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading this blog. I hope I have at least highlighted some yet unharnessed aspects of the sites and resources people already commonly use. Please stay tuned in the next week or two for more on social media in medicine. I am working together with a colleague to produce 'Guidelines for Social Media in Medicine,' in light of the recent material on the subject by the General Medical Council.
Please feel free to comment below if you feel you have a Top Tip that I haven't included!
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As always, any views expressed here are mine alone and are not representative of any organisation.
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Maybe it’s just me, but I cannot get my head around pharmacology and antibiotics are certainly doing their best to finish me off! My group at uni decided that this was one area that we needed to revise, and the task fell on my hands to provide the material for a revision session. So, the night before the session I began to panic about how to come up with any useful tips for my group, or indeed anyone at all, to try to remember anything useful about antibiotics at all. If only Paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin was a real drug, it would make our lives so much easier. Come on Adam Kay and Suman Biswas, get the trials started and create your wonderful super drug. For the mean time I guess I will just have to keep blissfully singing along to your song. However, that is not going to help me with my task in hand.
After a lot of research that even took me beyond the realms of Wikipedia (something I do not often like to do), I found various sources suggesting remembering these Top 10 Rules (and their exceptions)
All cell wall inhibitors are ?-lactams (except vancomycin)
All penicillins are water soluble (nafcillin)
All protein synthesis inhibitors are bacteriostatic (aminoglycosides)
All cocci are Gram positive (Neisseria spp.)
All bacilli are Gram negative (anthrax, tetanus, botulism, diptheria)
All spirochetes are Gram negative
Tetracyclines and macrolides are used for intracellular bacteria
Pregnant women should not take tetracyclines, aminoglycosides,
fluroquinolones, or sulfonamides
Antibiotics beginning with a ‘C’ are particularly associated with
pseudomembranous colitis
While the penicillins are the most famous for causing allergies, people may also react to cephalosporins
If those work for you, then I guess you can stop reading now… If they don’t, I can’t promise that I have anything better, but give these other tips that I found a whirl… Alternatively, I have created a Page on my own blog called Rang and Dale’s answer to Antibiotics, which summarises their information, so please take a look at that.
Most people will suggest that you can categorise antibiotics in three ways, and it’s best to pick one and learn examples of them.
Mode of action:
bactericidal (kill)
bacteriostatic (stop multiplying)
2 mnemonics to potentially help you remember examples:
We’re ECSTaTiC about bacteriostatics?
Erythromycin Clindamycin Sulphonamides Tetracyclines Trimethoprim
Chloramphenicol
Very Finely Proficient At Cell Murder (bactericidal) - Vancomycin Fluroquinolones Penicillins Aminoglycosides Cephalosporins
Metranidazole
Spectrum of activity:
broad-spectrum (gram positive AND negative)
narrow (gram positive OR negative)
Mechanism of action
Inhibit cell wall synthesis
Inhibit nucleic acid synthesis
Inhibit protein synthesis
Inhibit cell membrane synthesis
If you have any more weird and wonderful ways to remember antibiotics, let me
know and I will add them! As always, thank you for reading.

If I had a penny, okay a pound, for every time a patient responded to the request to practice examining them said, 'Well, we all gotta learn', I would be a very rich medical student. (I'd like to add that this is said in a strong West-country accent, just so that you feel like you're really there.) I'm sure that the majority of my colleagues would agree.
Today has been no different except for the fact that one of the patients I met described themselves as a 'whistleblower'. It was like my subconscious slapping me around the face and telling me to stop procrastinating. Why, you ask? Well I'm starting to get a little nervous actually, in exactly two weeks I'll be presenting my thoughts on whistleblowing (you might remember me going on about this during dissertation season) to a load of academics and healthcare professionals. My sphincters loosen up at the thought of it*
Within five minutes of meeting this patient, they had imparted their wise words on me 'Chantal, just remember when you become a doctor - if you're absolutely sure that you're right about something then never be afraid to speak up about it.' Like music to my ears. Well, until he told me that he was convinced that 'cannabis cures all ills.'
Each to their own.
*I sincerely apologise, poor medic joke. Yuck.
Written by Chantal Cox-George,
3rd Year Med Student at University of Bristol

I’m a klutz. Always have been. Probably always will be. I blame my clumsiness on the fact that I didn’t crawl. Apparently I was sitting around one day and toddling on two feet the next. Whatever the cause, it’s a well-tested fact that I’m not good on icy footpaths. Various parts of my anatomy have gotten up close and personal with frozen ground on many an occasion. Not usually an issue for a born-and-bred Australian, except when said Australian goes to visit her Canadian family during the northern winter.
During one such visit, I found myself unceremoniously plopped onto slick ice while my two-year-old niece frolicked around me with sure-footed abandon. I thought, “There has to be an easier way.” As freezing water seeped through my jeans, providing a useful cold pack for my screaming coccyx, my memory was jogged.
I recalled that a lateral-thinking group of New Zealand researchers had won the Ignoble Prize for Physics for demonstrating that wearing socks on the outsides of shoes reduces the incidence of falls on icy footpaths. To the amusement of my niece, I tried out the theory for myself on the walk home. I don’t know if I had a more secure foothold or not, but I did manage to get blisters from wearing sneakers without socks.
I love socks. They cover my large, ungainly clod-hoppers and keep my toes toasty warm almost all year round. You know the song ‘You can leave your hat on.’? Well for me, it is more a case of ‘You can leave your socks on, especially in winter. There’s nothing unromantic about that… is there?
I’m not, however, as attached to my socks as a patient I once treated. As an intern doing a psychiatry rotation, one of my tasks was to do physical examinations on all admissions. Being a dot-the-i’s kinda girl, when an old homeless man declined to remove his socks so that I could examine his feet, I didn’t let it slide.
“I haven’t taken off my socks for thirty years,” he pronounced.
“It can’t be that long. Your socks aren’t thirty years old. In fact, they look quite new,” I countered.
“When the old ones wear out, I just slip a new pair over the top.”
I didn’t believe him. From his odour, I would have believed that he hadn’t showered in thirty years, but the sock story didn’t add up.
He eventually agreed to let me take them off. The top two sock layers weren’t a problem but then I ran into trouble. Black remains of what used to be socks clung firmly to his feet, and my gentle attempts at their removal resulted in screams of agony. I tried soaking his feet. Still no luck. His skin had grown up into the fibres, and it was impossible to extract the old sock remnants without ripping off skin.
In retrospect I probably should have left the old man alone, but instead got the psych registrar to have a peek, who then involved the emergency registrar, who called the surgeon and soon enough the patient and his socks were off to theatre.
The ‘surgical removal of socks’ was not a commonly performed procedure, and it provided much staff amusement. It wasn’t so funny for Mr. Sock Man, who required several skin grafts!
From my perspective here in Canada, while I thoroughly commend the Kiwis for their ground-breaking sock research, I think I’ll stick to the more traditional socks-in-shoes approach, change my socks regularly and work a bit on my coordination skills.
References:
PHYSICS PRIZE: Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes. "Preventing Winter Falls: A Randomised Controlled Trial of a Novel Intervention," Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest, New Zealand Medical Journal. vol. 122, no, 1298, July 3, 2009, pp. 31-8.
(This blog post has been adapted from a column first published in Australian Doctor http://www.australiandoctor.com.au/articles/58/0c06f058.asp)
Dr Genevieve Yates is an Australian GP, medical educator, medico-legal presenter and writer. You can read more of her work at http://genevieveyates.com/

This Podcast features an interview with Gerald W. Dorn II and Moshi Song, authors of a Research Article that appears in the 21 April 2015 issue of Science Signaling, about how two related isoforms of protein kinase C (PKC) control growth of the heart in both developmental and pathological contexts. There are several isoforms of PKC, and these participate in many different signaling pathways that control diverse cellular processes. Based on how they are activated, PKCs are categorized into three groups: conventional, novel, and atypical. PKCδ and PKCε are closely related novel PKCs that have partially redundant functions in the heart. By removing both PKCδ and PKCε from cardiomyocytes, Song et al. found that these two related PKC isoforms normally limit heart growth both during development and in adult mice. Embryos lacking both PKCδ and PKCε had enlarged hearts, and adults lacking both PKCδ and PKCε exhibited greater cardiac hypertrophy in response to pressure overload. These results have implications for the clinical use of PKC inhibitors to treat cardiac disease and other diseases, such as cancer.